Sunday Spotlight: Bastille Day in Paris

Yesterday at 10:30 in the morning, as on every 14th of July in Paris, delta formations of Mirage fighter jets and lumbering military transports screamed across the leaden skies in successive waves.

Oh! you think, putting down your coffee and looking out the window, waiting for the formations to appear after being preceded several seconds by their own thunderous roar, it's Bastille Day. 

Visions of khaki-clad Legionnaires and the Republican Guard in horse formations and camouflaged tanks rumbling down the Champs Élysées—a musty, pompous tradition that reeks of May Day parades back in the good ole USSR. (The French also love to clap rhythmically after concerts and operas, but that's for another post... )

The new President, François Hollande, even had his Michael Dukakis moment trundling along in an armored personnel carrier in a navy-blue suit.

 But beyond the obvious target of a once-major world power playing out the slightly painful anachronisms left over from its days of gloire, the holiday does remind you quite forcefully, even after all these years, of your outsider status. You can't help but roll your eyes at the awkward, somehow plaintive military breast-beating meant to impress and reassure a people (who can only be truly impressed with deeply discounted prices for superfluous consumer goods) with the outdated forms and trappings of the time of their greatness, and you look on the scale of the display with bemusement and complete disinterest. And that complete detachment extends to not even remembering the date until the jets begin to scream overhead, or even finding a scintilla of the slightest emotional investment that every last Frenchman must feel, because not even the most cynical of continentals can rest indifferent who was born here, since it is in your blood and you cannot help but at some point during the day be seduced by pride of country and a free-floating but keen nostalgia for an idea the Germans call Heimat.

So the planes scream by, reminding you this can never be your true home.

Actually, Paris is empty right now, and cold and rain-sodden. There hasn't been a summer to speak of, or an entire warm, sunny day since sometime in late May (and I actually ran the heat last night). Everyone is on vacation—6 weeks per year minimum, 8 weeks for most everybody (not counting the mysterious congés and the universally exploited formation, both of which, if played right, add another ten days of paid free time to the tally). I kid you not, les américains.

The official, countrywide start of the summer vacation season, when France literally closes for two full months, is, for the average Frenchman, almost as exciting as an adolescent's first furtive lovemaking, but so much more satisfying! (The local dry cleaner actually hangs an engraved brass plaque announcing his fermature annuelle and bakeries must co-ordinate their closing dates so as not to leave too vast a swath of ghostly Paris without access to baguettes.)

 

The media gears up for it with breathless, heartpoundingly important special reports, while nonstop traffic updates scroll across the bottom of regular programming all the last week of June, and incessant newsflashes feature a color-coded alert system analyzing the status of the major southbound autoroutes  (remember those Bush-era terror scares?), all of it leading up to the first Friday in July: D-Day!

Everyone scrambles in a mad, delirious rush to be the first to get the heck out of Dodge and indulge in the perfect trifecta of the three universally acknowledged pillars of French identity (and the main subjects of French conversation): food, sex and vacation. Of course, after all those embouteillages sur l'autroute, the Parisians find themselves just as sardine-packed on the beaches.

If only half such dedication and zeal had been expended to defend the country in 1940 as is done today to see to it that the groaning family Citröen, bound down with roof bins and bicycles, arrives on the Côte d'Azur without having sat in a traffic jam, then Angela Merkel would today be speaking French.

The over-accessorized adolescents, slumped in the back seats of cars in Biarritz and Nice and St-Tropez, dangle a foot or languid hand out the window in the clichéd symbol of French lassitude as they crawl along the overburdened and sun-struck beachside avenues. 

A month on the beach, or in the country at the ancestral compound, then a week back in Paris to wash and sort out the laundry, make sure the apartment is in order, and then off again to Charles de Gaulle airport for another two weeks on a holiday tour.

Vive les vacances ! Vive la France !

Russian Follies and Pavilions

One of the great cultural revelations to occur in the aftermath the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago was the West's rediscovery of St. Petersburg and its great imperial estates.

First and oldest is Peterhof, the residence of the city's founder and namesake, Peter the Great, built on the shores of the Neva Bay of the Gulf of Finland, Russia's maritime corridor to Europe and the raison d'être of St. Petersburg itself.

Below, the cascades at Peterhof.

To the southeast are Tarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk: the former the Russian Versailles, magisterial and imprinted with the remarkable personality of Catherine (II) the Great, and later the bourgeois taste of her grandson, Alexander I; the latter the exquisite neo-Palladian estate of her ill-fated son, Paul I, and his widowed Empress, Maria Feodorovna.

At top, the Caprice or Krestovy Bridge at Tarskoye Selo and below, the Pavilion of the Three Graces by Cameron at Pavlovsk.

Oranienbaum, the baroque hunting estate of Catherine II—originally built for Duke Aleksandr Menshikov, boon companion to Peter the Great and de facto czar during the reign of Catherine I—is to the west near the Neva Bay. Though built on a monumental scale that is typically Russian, Oranienbaum is nonetheless the most intimate and rustic of all the imperial estates and that most in harmony with nature.

Below, the Peterhof Gate at Oranienbaum.

Finally, there is the outlying estate of Gatchina, the vast neoclassical palace Catherine II ordered built for her lover, Count Orlov, and which she graciously repurchased from his heirs for her son Paul upon Orlov's death. Gatchina is as far again to the south of Tarskoye Selo as it in turn is from St. Petersburg, its relative isolation (with that of Oranienbaum) causing it to suffer from a chronic lack of funds for its complete restoration.

Below, the monumental ruins of the Aviary at Gatchina.

Peterhof, Tarskoye Selo and Gatchina are palaces conceived on a scale rivaling Versailles and Fontainebleau, but were used solely as residences; there was no precedent in Russia for the court living in attendance on the czar. And all five of these estates feature formal gardens and landscape parks scattered with an unparalleled variety of pavilions, garden follies and monuments in Easter-egg colors, the work of a host of foreign architects—predominately Italian, later British—who brought to Russia the architectural knowledge it so sorely lacked. The Italians—Rastrelli, Rinaldi and Rossi—designed palaces and pavilions of such baroque exuberance that they have few counterparts even in Italy, and later the Scottish architect Cameron and the Italian Quarenghi designed a host of serenely proportioned neoclassical structures for Catherine the Great and Paul I at Tarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk.

Below, Rastrelli's spectacular Hermitage Pavilion in the Catherine Park of Tarskoye Selo.

Whether baroque or neoclassical, these imperial estates are all follies in the broadest sense; there is little or no contrast, as in France, between the sober palace and its garden buildings, but rather the palaces themselves are often more gilded, more colorful, more ornate, more plastic—in short, more exuberant—than the follies in their parks. Consider below, the chapel at Peterhof: